My latest presentations
Just wanted to make everyone aware of my latest presentations that I recently uploaded. Details below. I also have a list of all my presentations with slide decks here.
Azure Synapse Analytics Overview
Azure Synapse Analytics is Azure SQL Data Warehouse evolved: a limitless analytics service, that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics into a single service. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources, at scale. Azure Synapse brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate business intelligence and machine learning needs. This is a huge deck with lots of screenshots so you can see exactly how it works. (slides)
Data Lake Overview
The data lake has become extremely popular, but there is still confusion on how it should be used. In this presentation I will cover common big data architectures that use the data lake, the characteristics and benefits of a data lake, and how it works in conjunction with a relational data warehouse. Then I’ll go into details on using Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 as your data lake, and various typical use cases of the data lake. As a bonus I’ll talk about how to organize a data lake and discuss the various products that can be used in a modern data warehouse. (slides)
Power BI Overview
Power BI has become a product with a ton of exciting features. This presentation will give an detailed overview of some of them, including Power BI Desktop, Power BI service, what’s new, integration with other services, Power BI premium, and administration. (slides)
Power BI Overview, Deployment and Governance
Deploying Power BI in a large enterprise is a complex task, and one that requires a lot of thought and planning. The purpose of this presentation is to help you make your Power BI deployment a success. After a quick Power BI overview, I’ll discuss deployment strategies, common usage scenarios, how to store and refresh data, prototyping options, how to share externally, and then finish with how to administer and secure Power BI. I’ll outline considerations and best practices for achieving an optimal, well-performing, enterprise level Power BI deployment. (slides)
Hi James,
Going through the Azure Synapse Analytics deck, I can’t help but think the Apache Spark Runtime is very much in line with Azure Databricks. Is it “just” Databricks under the hood? If not, how would you externally orchestrate the execution of notebooks with something line Apache Airflow? Or even from with Azure Synapse Studio (Azure Data Factory).
Tuan
Hi Tuan,
The Apache Spark Runtime in Synapse is not Azure Databricks. Rather, it is the open source version of Spark. I’m not yet sure how you can execute Spark notebooks within Synapse from Airflow, but you can call them from Data Integration within Synapse. Data Integration is really just ADF so it works the same as calling notebooks from ADF.
Thanks James. That’s interesting. I wonder what Databricks think of that :-). So in ADF there’ll be an activity for executing a notebook against a Spark pool? I also wonder how you’ll develop notebooks and libraries locally and deploy using Azure DevOps. I’m guessing Synapse studio will hold notebooks in a workspace. I’m dying to give it a go but haven’t got access to create a workspace yet.
Hi James,
Thank you for sharing all these valuable information. Synapse is an exciting product and we hope that it makes it simple to do variety of workloads in one platform.
I do have a question though, I recently came across this blog (https://www.blue-granite.com/blog/is-azure-sql-data-warehouse-a-good-fit-updated) which provides a well thought decision tree to decide whether SQL DW is an appropriate choice.
Do you think this would change with Synapse? In fact we would love to see such a decision tree from Microsoft to help us to choose the right tool for different tasks.
I think Melissa’s decision tree would change a bit with Synapse, especially around using both non-relational and relational data, as Synapse makes it easy to use both. When Synapse GA’s, I’ll talk with Melissa about updating that tree as well as seeing if Microsoft can do one 🙂
Thank you for that. Microsoft is certainly have the right/best people to take this product in the right direction.
Hi, would it be possible to obtain a copy of “Azure Synapse Analytics Overview” presentation without having to register/download on SlideShare?
If so, where would I find the download?
thanks
I placed the deck here: https://serrapublic.blob.core.windows.net/presentations/Azure%20Synapse%20Analytics%20Overview.pdf